We all come from varying educational and professional backgrounds, and most of us are students. Some of us have never coded before in our life, but we combined our ideas and supported each others efforts in learning Unity, understanding the mechanics of gravity, and using software tools like Git. Despite all our differing experiences, we have all found the same passion for space, but agreed that the science behind space flight should be presented in a less intimidating and hands-on way to help spread our love of the field to a larger audience.

UniverseBuilder builds on previous orbital mechanics simulations by providing a more exploratory sandbox experience that actively teaches the physics behind space flight. Some challenges we faced were deciding how to make the planets visible and manipulable despite the huge distances between them, modelling accurate motion in every moment of the orbit of the planets, and becoming familiar with the structure of Unity. UniverseBuilder was coded in C# in Unity.

We were all excited about all the possibilities we were able to brainstorm for our project and we were able to create revolving planetary bodies in a space system. We used publicly available NASA data to obtain the masses and distances of planets, images to model the planets, links to NASA educational pages to encourage learning, and hope to use the NASA Exoplanet API to add more planets in the future. We also want to expands on other concepts like the habitability of a planet and how other factors like temperature or shape affect the interaction between planets. Additionally, we could manipulable rockets and satelllites so people could explore their interactions with planetary bodies as well.

The link to our GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/goodkris/angryspacebirds.

The link to our interactive website is here: https://angryspacebirds-e9xcim4f3.now.sh.

#orbital mechanics #simualtion #video game #csharp #unity #moon #exoplanet #planet #physics #solar system #newton #earth #rocket #satellite #3D #exploratory #education #inspiration #accesibility #webgl #space